Ben's journey into a hearing world.: June 2011

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Swimmer!

Today was Ben's first day of swimming lessons. This is his third year of lessons, but his first as a hearing boy. Last year Ben had both implants, but we took them off and he swam without hearing. He wasn't happy in the water at all. So, this year I did LOTS of research and bought a silicone swim cap and a water proof bag.

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We practiced wearing the swim cap around the house for a few days.

At the pool, Ben walked around and assessed the situation.

He decided he was ready to go in and the work began!

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I put his processor in a waterproof bag and folded it up.

Then I tried to get the magnet to connect through the bag. As long as the magnet is connected, he is able to receive sound. It doesn't matter at all where the rest of the contraption is, just the magnet (the circular portion pictured at the top of the bag- technically called the coil). Part of the cap's job is to keep the magnet in place, as long as I can keep it in place AND pull the cap over Ben's head.

He could hear me even with the microphones inside the bag when I stuck it on like this.

The hard part was keeping the magnet in place while I slipped the cap on over the bag and his head.

Addilyn looks worried for a reason.

Grandma and I tucked and stretched.

And pulled.

Finally, Grandma talked some sense into that cap

and we prevailed.

He was off, lookin' as sharp as ever, ready to swim.

The whole time we swam, I asked Ben if he could hear me and he always answered. I did have to talk much louder.

We didn't go underwater, but the cap got pretty wet.

When we got out and uncovered the bag, the outside was wet and the processor on the inside was DRY! Yeah Ben!

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As we ate dinner that night Ben said, "Where's tongue?"

Me: "Your tongue? In you mouth."

Ben: "No my tongue. Silly Mommy. The man in the water. Tongue."

Me: "Your swimming teacher? Tom?"

Ben:"Yeah. Tongue. What he doing now?"

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I realized I had only talked about TOM, the swimming instructor, while we were in the water- with the swim cap on.

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Tongue. Of course.

How else would 'Tom' sound through a waterproof bag, a swim cap, and a cochlear implant?

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Silly mommy.

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Ben's Words

“I'll try to make a visual picture that relates to the way sound is heard by a child with a cochlear implant. Suppose that you have to identify a four-legged animal, and you’ve not seen that animal before, but you have to figure out what it is. Maybe you have to draw it. Maybe you have to learn the name for it. Now, that animal is standing behind a bunch of trees. To see that animal, you have to look through tree trunks that are hiding big parts of that animal. Now, if you were looking through those trees with the equivalent of a hearing aid, you could probably only see the tail end of that animal, because you could only hear the low frequencies with that hearing aid. With a cochlear implant, though, you could see pieces of that animal’s head, pieces of its neck, its legs, its body, and pieces of its tail end, but you still would be missing pieces in between each of those that you could see. The reason I’m bringing this up for you to think about is because it’s important for us to realize that children who are using cochlear implants still don’t see the whole animal. They see more of a range of that animal, but they have to use their brains. They have to use what they already know about the world. They have to use their cognitive abilities to fill in those gaps to be able to put together a picture of that whole animal. That’s the kind of task that a child is facing using a cochlear implant.”
Dr. Patricia Spencer. Considerations for the Future: Putting It All Together, Presented at Cochlear Implants and Sign Language conference, April, 2002.